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Ukraine Launches Its Counterattack
The long announced Ukrainian counter offensive has started. New Ukrainian units, never seen before, have come to the front.
The attack was launched by Ukraine for political reasons under pressure from its 'western' sponsors. Militarily it is unlikely to become successful but it will eat away at whatever is left of Ukraine's military capabilities.
Attacks happened all around the front. In the north towards Belgograd, to the east and, with the most forces, towards the south. There was so far little to no success in any of the attacks.
The daily report by the Russian Ministry of Defense list as Ukrainian losses over the last 24 hours 910 soldiers, 16 tanks, 33 armored combat vehicles/infantry fighting vehicle and some 30 trucks.
So far only the most forward positions of Russian troops have been attacked. There are two to three well organized defense lines behind those. The Russians can fall back whenever needed and let the artillery and air force destroy their oncoming enemies.
As I wrote previously about any attacks in the direction of Tokmak and Melitopol:
From the point of strategic value the chosen target is the right one. However, it is also the one where the Russian military has prepared its strongest defense lines.
Source: @Inkvisiit, Scribblemaps – bigger
In military books this is know as 'echeloned defense' with three lines of well prepared positions ten kilometer apart from each other. Each line consists of tank obstacles, mine belts, prepared anti-tank positions to monitor and counter potential breach attempts and well prepared artillery support from behind the next defense line.
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To crack such a nut without air support and without significant artillery advantage is nearly impossible.
There may still come larger attacks in other directions. But how many could there be?
As a former Swedish officer notes:
June 4th UkrAF scaled up offensive operations on the Southern Front, but the losses are too high for long time success. Earlier operations were mainly reconnaissance in force with platoon and company sized combat groups. Yesterday the Ukrainian forces seemed to be battalion sized combat groups. According to Russian MoD 8 UkrAF battalions was involved in offensive operations SE of Mala Tokmachka (1), at the Vremivka salient (2) and East of Vuhledar towards Velikonovoselovka (3). The fighting was intense, but on most places Ukrainian forces was turned back, mainly by intense Russian artillery and air attacks. On some places UkrAF succeeded in capturing a couple of hundred meters.
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[If the Russian numbers are true], the prospects for a Ukrainian counteroffensive looks very dim. This is even if we don't take into account the ongoing intense Russian air and artillery offensive against UkrAF troop concentrations, ammunition and fuel depots.
With losses of over 1000 KIA and WIA that means that a Ukrainian brigade of 4000 man loose at least 25 percent of its manpower. That's on the brink of making a brigade unusable. Two days fighting with such losses would destroy a brigade's battle capability. 24 days with such losses would in effect destroy the entire fist of 12 brigades UkrAF has gathered for the counteroffensive. With losses of around 12 brigades, 25 000 KIA/WIA, 250 tanks and 1000 IFVs/APCs all the strategic reserves UkrAF has built during the last 6 months would be gone. In exchange the Ukrainian side could have advanced maybe 10 km on some places or more generally 2-3 km along maybe half the southern front.
Once again, IF the Russian claims are true, RuAF must feel relieved and UkrAF very worried by the results of the fighting on the Southern front June 4th.
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I strongly suspect that the Russian military will let the Ukrainian attacks run their course to then launch its own larger scale attacks against weakened Ukrainian defenses.
here: the NYT text
sry found no better way of posting it here.
But I guess antiwar will bring a better formatted soon. After all this article is being discussed many places
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbolsukraine.
html
“(…)
Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian
propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century
trying to eliminate.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff
June 5, 2023 Updated 1:12 p.m. ET
KYIV, Ukraine — Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the
Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted,
three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a
soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency
worker posing in front of a truck.
In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols
that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of
the iconography of far-right hate groups.
The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s
complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both
Soviet and German occupation during World War II.
That relationship has become especially delicate because President Vladimir
V. Putin of Russia has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he
has used to justify his illegal invasion.
Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History
Ukraine has worked for years through legislation and military restructuring
to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols
steeped in Nazi history and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q.
movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have
been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea
region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure.
Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains
marginalized politically.
The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch
worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun,
now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the
front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian
sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.
In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and
giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” — a
position that ignores the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is
Jewish. More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and
sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to
icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.
“What worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are
in leadership positions, either they don’t or they’re not willing to acknowledge
and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” said
Michael Colborne, a researcher at the investigative group Bellingcat who
studies the international far right. “I think Ukrainians need to increasingly
realize that these images undermine support for the country.”
In a statement, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said that, as a country that
suffered greatly under German occupation, “We emphasize that Ukraine
categorically condemns any manifestations of Nazism.”
So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war. It has,
however, left diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups in a difficult
position: Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian
propaganda. Saying nothing allows it to spread.
Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called
out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have
worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points.
Questions over how to interpret such symbols are as divisive as they are
persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South, some have insisted
that today, the Confederate flag symbolizes pride, not its history of racism and
secession. The swastika was an important Hindu symbol before it was coopted
by the Nazis.
In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter
account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known
as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was
made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded
concentration camps during World War II.
The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a
small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a
British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces
“hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”
The Anti-Defamation League considers the Totenkopf “a common hate
symbol.” But Jake Hyman, a spokesman for the group, said it was impossible
to “make an inference about the wearer or the Ukrainian Army” based on the
patch.
“The image, while offensive, is that of a musical band,” Mr. Hyman said.
The band now uses the photograph posted by the Ukrainian military to
market the Totenkopf patch.
The New York Times asked the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on April 27 about
the tweet. Several hours later, the post was deleted. “After studying this case,
we came to the conclusion that this logo can be interpreted ambiguously,” the
ministry said in a statement.
The soldier in the photograph was part of a volunteer unit called the Da Vinci
Wolves, which started as part of the paramilitary wing of Ukraine’s Right
Sector, a coalition of right-wing organizations and political parties that
militarized after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
At least five other photographs on the Wolves’ Instagram and Facebook pages
feature their soldiers wearing Nazi-style patches, including the Totenkopf.
NATO militaries, an alliance that Ukraine hopes to join, do not tolerate such
patches. When such symbols have appeared, groups like the Anti-Defamation
League have spoken out, and military leaders have reacted swiftly.
Last month, Ukraine’s state emergency services agency posted on Instagram
a photograph of an emergency worker wearing a Black Sun symbol, also
known as a Sonnenrad, that appeared in the castle of Heinrich Himmler, the
Nazi general and SS director. The Black Sun is popular among neo-Nazis and
white supremacists.
In March 2022, NATO’s Twitter account posted a photograph of a Ukrainian
soldier wearing a similar patch.
Both photographs were quickly removed.
In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a
Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called
R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was
affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists
had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.
Ihor Kozlovskyi, a Ukrainian historian and religious scholar, said that the
symbols had meanings that were unique to Ukraine and should be interpreted
by how Ukrainians viewed them, not by how they had been used elsewhere.
“The symbol can live in any community or any history independently of how it
is used in other parts of Earth,” Mr. Kozlovskyi said.
Russian soldiers in Ukraine have also been seen wearing Nazi-style patches,
underscoring how complicated interpreting these symbols can be in a region
steeped in Soviet and German history.
The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, so it was
caught by surprise two years later when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, which
was then part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had suffered greatly under a Soviet
government that engineered a famine that killed millions. Many Ukrainians
initially viewed the Nazis as liberators.
Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent
army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for
Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities
against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, though, some of the
groups fought against the Nazis.
A Ukrainian service member is wearing what appears to be a Black Sun on the chest of
her uniform in this photograph published by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of
Ukraine on Feb. 14 and on the NATO Twitter account before being deleted. General Staff
of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
Some Ukrainians joined Nazi military units like the Waffen-SS Galizien. The
emblem of the group, which was led by German officers, was a sky-blue patch
showing a lion and three crowns. The unit took part in a massacre of hundreds
of Polish civilians in 1944. In December, after a yearslong legal battle,
Ukraine’s highest court ruled that a government-funded research institute
could continue to list the unit’s insignia as excluded from the Nazi symbols
banned under a 2015 law.
Today, as a new generation fights against Russian occupation, many
Ukrainians see the war as a continuation of the struggle for independence
during and immediately after World War II. Symbols like the flag associated
with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Galizien patch have become
emblems of anti-Russian resistance and national pride.
That makes it difficult to easily separate, on the basis of icons alone, the
Ukrainians enraged by the Russian invasion from those who support the
country’s far-right groups.
Units like the Da Vinci Wolves, the better-known Azov regiment and others
that began with far-right members have been folded into the Ukrainian
military, and have been instrumental in defending Ukraine from Russian
A Russian volunteer fighter for the Ukrainian Army, center, wearing a Galizien patch
and another featuring a Totenkopf in southern Ukraine in 2022. Ivor Prickett for The
New York Times
troops.
The Azov regiment was celebrated after holding out during the siege of the
southern city of Mariupol last year. After the commander of the Da Vinci
Wolves was killed in March, he received a hero’s funeral, which Mr. Zelensky
attended.
“I think some of these far-right units mix a fair bit of their own mythmaking
into the public discourse on them,” said Mr. Colborne, the researcher. “But I
think the least that can and should be done everywhere, not just Ukraine, is
not allowing the far right’s symbols, rhetoric and ideas to seep into public
discourse.”
Kitty Bennett and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a Ukraine correspondent and a former Marine infantryman. @tmgneff
Posted by: AG | Jun 6 2023 1:42 utc | 219
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